A Congressional Priesthood

About the Author

Andrews Air Force Base is just a short limousine ride from
Capitol Hill, just outside the Beltway and about as far into real
America, it seems, as our isolated Congress would like to go.
Andrews is far enough away from the Hill that the nation's
legislators can escape the legislative grind but still be well
shielded from the prying eyes of the general public, so that they
can act, well, like themselves. While a "reform" spirit continues
to sweep the Hill and perks keep dropping, at least temporarily, by
the wayside, it's useful to recall something which happened at
Andrews Air Force Base last fall: the Congressional Golf Tournament
held on the base course.

There, you could see well-tanned senators and congressmen
dressed in gaudy golf clothes gathered at the base officer's club.
Imagine, if you will, mighty legislators with tiny whales and
anchors and other little devices embroidered on their kelly-green
pants coming in from their day on the course. As they indulged in
food, drink, and camaraderie, they were able to contemplate a
veritable tumulus of consumer goods, very expensive ones, piled
before them: VCRs, crystal, electronic gadgets, clothing, liquor,
magnums of champagne. All this vast pile, provided, by the way, by
lobbyists, was to be handed out as prizes for various feats on the
golf course that day. The august lawmakers eyed this mass of goods
in such an anxious way that it was clear their $125,000 a year
salaries had not inured them from intense freebie lust.

Somehow it was decided that the idea of awarding prizes would be
dispensed with. Everyone could take what they wanted. Whatever
decorum there may have been quickly evaporated. Elbowing each other
aside the men, all of whom had been provided with $400 leather golf
bags courtesy of some lobbyist, began stuffing items into these
handy containers in what a participant described later to the Wall
Street Journal as a "feeding frenzy."

A World Apart. Such sordid scenes remain largely hidden from
public knowledge because Congress truly does live in a world apart.
It's not just the perks and salaries; it's much more. We're seeing
all that go by the wayside for the moment under the glare of
publicity: the fixed parking tickets, the free first class
upgrades, the junkets, the numerous slush funds disguised as
furniture allowances and stationery expenditures, et cetera, et
cetera, et cetera. But there's something else that sets the
Congress apart, something of which the perks are just a symptom.
It's a wilful elitism which has become institutionalized and
manifests itself in the very texture of life on the Hill. Congress,
by and large, sees itself not working for the people as public
servants, but governing them. It does what it wants and it takes
what it wants.

The House check kiting scandal is an obvious example. Go back to
the early days when it was first revealed that the House bank,
staffed by patronage employees, was allowing overdrafts to float
for months and even years. As the dimensions of the scandal first
became apparent, the lawmakers instinctively tried to cover up what
was going on.

Read the newspaper accounts of those early days and see the
character of the immediate reaction of the Congress to that
scandal. A reporter tried to find out whether the House Ways and
Means Committee chairman, Dan Rostenkowski, had bounced any checks.
One of the congressman's key aides confronted the journalist and
said, "Aren't you ashamed? This is none of your business."
Representative Barney Frank embellished that and just said, "It's
none of your damn business." Gus Savage replied, "Call back when
you have a serious question."

As public outrage grew, we noticed that the House fell back on
its favorite defense, assuring the public that it would have the
matter investigated -- by, of course, the House Ethics Committee, a
body whose chief purpose is as a staple of stand-up comedy. But my
favorite moment, I think, was when a spokesman for Speaker Foley
reminded the press that these overdrafts were paid out of members'
bank balances and therefore no "public funds" were ever used. It
never occurred to the staffer that every dollar of the House bank
overhead and salary of staff, every dollar in its accounts, was our
money. We, the people, pay these solons their ill-gotten
salaries.

Watch congressmen and -women on the Hill and you see a separate
race of public figures carefully coiffed, clothed, considerably
pancaked for the television cameras, moving about on private
elevators, cordoned from staring tourists by sycophantic doormen
and their own police force. They have slipped the bonds of being
public servants and assumed the mantle of governing in their own
right. While burdening the people with massive regulations, they
have, of course, exempted themselves routinely from all of them.
Congress is totally exempt from such strictures as the Equal
Employment Opportunity Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act,
the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Freedom of Information Act, the
Wage and Hour Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act, all of the
Civil Rights Acts.

Fancying themselves "in touch with the people" and fooling many
voters through the technological trickery of such things as
computerized letters to answer constituent mail with replies
tailored to every issue, our senators and representatives basically
listen only to each other and to the special interest lobbyists,
many of whom are ex-congressional staffers or government
bureaucrats. They hear what they want to hear in endless rounds of
hearings, receptions, and junkets, disguised as fact-finding
trips.

Spenders Listening to Spenders. Read the excellent work which
Jim Payne (James L. Payne, The Culture of Spending: Why Congress
Lives Beyond Our Means (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1991).) has done
showing how this congressional culture thrives on itself and how
its budget planning is nothing but spenders listening to spenders
in carefully orchestrated hearings. Look, too -- if you believe
that Congress might somehow be taught to hold the line on national
spending -- at what Congress spends on itself. In fiscal 1991,
while businesses were cutting back, holding the line, offering
three and four percent salary increases, an expansionist Congress
increased its spending 14.2 percent to over $2.5 billion for its
offices, its burgeoning staffs, its police, its trappings, and
perquisites.

In fiscal 1992, Congress's spending on itself will jump 17.5
percent to over $3 billion. This reflects not only the pay
increases for the legislators themselves, but many other costs.
There are now 20 committees and 87 subcommittees in the Senate, 27
committees and 155 subcommittees in the House; 37,000 employees on
Capitol Hill. Five times the level from 1970.

This is all part of a phenomenon that really should give us
pause. There was a survey done by the Kettering Foundation that
didn't get much notice last year. Called "Citizens and Politics as
Viewed From Main Street America," it shows that despite the
conventional wisdom that Americans are apathetic about national
politics, the real problem lies elsewhere, on Capitol Hill. The
Foundation concluded that "citizens do care about politics but they
no longer believe they can have an effect. They feel politically
impotent." Why? Because the study finds they feel they have been
cut off from most policy issues due to the way these issues are
framed and talked about in Washington. They are cut off by arcane
procedures, and a foreign insider language that is alien to
them.

I have seen this problem close up on Capitol Hill, and as I have
interviewed congressmen and staff people, I've come to realize more
than ever that Congress does its business in such a way as to
really cut the public out of the loop. It has created elaborate
parliamentary and procedural screens behind which it can conduct
its business without what it considers interference from the
public. Indeed, it has gone to the trouble of creating an ersatz
forum of "public input," elaborately, orches- trated through select
witnesses and structured hearings. It has created for itself a
huge, complex, yet virtually invisible legislative system which
goes its own way, forming legislation on its own terms and with
input only from those lobbyists and pressure groups which it
chooses to hear.

Congress, if you really want to understand it, has become a
priesthood, a priesthood of legislators, staff, and lobbyists. It
is a priesthood of Byzantine complexities, temples within temples,
rites within rites. It employs a variety of obscure procedures,
terms of art, et cetera, all designed to create an illusion of
openness. And the press, in many ways, goes along with this,
because the press's position is enhanced by this priesthood.
Journalists are privileged to come down onto the steps of the
temple and explain to the masses the mysterious rites going on
inside.

It is interesting, isn't it, that it took two reporters from the
Philadelphia Inquirer fifteen months of working day-in and day-out
to ferret out the story of how the 1990 tax bill came into being.
Think about that! Here was a bill which affected you and me, every
American, and yet it took two reporters, working full-time and
using every tool of their trade from leaks to Freedom of
Information filings to consultations with accountants and lawyers
to furtive meetings with staffers who said, "Don't use my name," to
find out what was in a tax bill.

Robert Potts, former chief of staff of the Senate Republican
Policy Committee and a top senatorial aide for former Senator Bill
Armstrong, notes that, "Curiously, all this has been compounding
even while the Congress seems to be becoming more open, with C-SPAN
coverage of both Houses. But remember, the Congress controls those
cameras and most of what is really significant cannot be seen by
the average citizen."

Congress's Tricks. There are many ways, of course, by which
Congress bypasses or subverts the normal civics class idea of how
legislation is produced. One, of course, is the informal session.
Before the formal session of the committee (which you may well see
on C-SPAN and thus feel you're seeing democracy at work) there has
already been an informal meeting of the main committee members in
which all the substantive issues have been agreed upon and ironed
out. There may well have been agreement in that meeting that no new
issues will be brought up during the public session. In some cases,
there may not even be this informal session, but merely a series of
phone calls between top staffers, extracting prior agreements that
no embarrassing amendments or new business will be brought up, and
that certain congressmen or senators who have shown a kind of a
meddlesome streak will be kept out of the procedures.

Another favorite device is to bypass the conference committee.
Instead of the usual meeting of House and Senate conferees to
reconcile two bills, a more informal get-together with key members
from both sides takes place. We'll never hear about this. There's
no conference report. Perhaps not even a complete transcript of the
meeting in which the mark-up takes place.

Then there are the so-called "task forces." These are the new ad
hoc, get-things-done groups on Capitol Hill. Instead of the full
committee meeting on something, task forces are formed excluding
certain "difficult" members. And, of course, there's that hoary
classic: simply delay the printing of the material from the
hearings themselves. The record of the hearings on a bill is often
not available in time to be of any use to those considering the
pros and cons of the legislation. (In the hearings, the pros far
outnumber the cons anyway.) Very often the final bill itself is not
prepared or made available in time for the vote. A thousand-page
bill is being considered and there is one copy on the floor for
members to come down and peruse. Who is going to read it, let alone
understand what is in it?

But my favorite device of all -- I love to see this one in
action -- is the concept that the more important and vital the
hearing, the smaller the hearing room. This is a very deeply
ingrained and very important matter on the Hill. Committees do not
want you to know what goes on when they get together with lobbyists
to thrash out legislation. So what is not settled over the
telephone or in an informal session is discussed in tiny rooms
where access is extremely limited. Go up to Capitol Hill very early
in the morning: you will see messengers who have been paid by
lobbyists to sit in the hall outside these legislative walk-in
closets. They sit in the hall and hold a place in line for various
special interest supplicants who will then have a chance to get
inside the room where this vital legislation is being "hammered
out."

Now, of course, the advocates of this system, the priests
themselves, say that this is a more effective way of doing
business. After all, it's so messy when the public gets involved in
these things.

"Just a Citizen." Bob Potts told me a story that I think best
illustrates the way Congress has become a world apart, how even
those with the best intentions become imbued with the
characteristics of a priesthood:

Senator Armstrong was on the Treasury and Postal
Subcommittee of Appropriations, so I would go to all those hearings
with him. One morning we had a meeting in which the Secretary of
the Treasury was testifying. It was just a small room and there
weren't many people there. While he was testifying, a man and his
family, tourists, came into the room. It was just a man and his
wife and their kids, kind of thrilled, I guess, to be seeing
democracy at work close up.

At one point the Secretary had to leave the room to make a phone
call or something and there was a break. This man got up and raised
his hand and said, "Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman," very quietly and
politely. He said he knew something about the point they were
discussing and he had something helpful he would like to say. We
all ignored him. I remember the staff people who were there, just
regular guys, good down-to-earth people, but suddenly they were
part of the different world, the different culture, and we ignored
this guy.

Finally some staff guy felt, "Well, I'd better do something,"
and he went down and spoke to the man for a minute. He came back
and we asked, "What did you tell him?"

He said, "I told the man that if he had anything to say he could
sign up to testify and come back in a couple of months."

Why didn't we just let this guy say what he had to say? It
wouldn't have hurt anything. But no, we were the Senate and he was
just a citizen.